FEHR ITSELF: NHL players union head Donald Fehr talks yesterday, surrounded by players such as the Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist (left) after commissioner Gary Bettman announced a lockout will begin Sunday if a deal is not struck before then.

Neither Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs nor Flyers CEO Ed Snider — to pick a pair of hardline hawks driving the NHL agenda — was allowed out from behind the curtain yesterday to explain their need to reach into the players’ pockets in order to enrich their own already substantial bottom lines, the league’s governors willingly gagged by a by-law that doesn’t permit them to speak for themselves.

Actions, though, speak louder than words ever could. And the NHL’s inexorable march toward its second owners’ lockout in the last eight years, this one set for Sunday at 12:00:01 a.m., tells the world the owners’ priority is not in finding a solution to the particular small-market issues that damage the league’s finances, but rather in devising a system in which they keep as much cash for themselves as they possibly can — even the owners operating thriving franchises such as Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and the Rangers.

Incredibly, it is the T-shirt-and-shorts-clad players who are not only more fully vested in the game’s growth than the league’s owners, but also appear to believe in the NHL’s capacity to grow more than the suits in the boardrooms.

It is the players who somehow still believe in the concept of a partnership that the league embraced as a core principle emerging from the last lockout, but abandoned in practicality the moment the ink was dry on the agreement.

The players have proposed taking significantly smaller percentages of the gross as the league generates additional revenue. The more the league creates, the more it keeps. The players have proposed aggressive revenue-sharing aid directed to needy franchises.

They have been met by the stone wall of the Board and commissioner Gary Bettman, who identify the league’s ills only as a function of the players making too much money.

“I thought we would be working more cooperatively in an attempt to find the solution to this, but that hasn’t been the case,” Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist said. “I didn’t want this to be ‘us against them,’ but their first offer set a tone I didn’t expect.

“They told us in a meeting that the system they got seven years ago hasn’t been working, so I thought they would be a little bit more open-minded about creating a new system, but that has not been the case.”

The union envisions continued annual revenue growth of 7.1 percent that is consistent with the data through the seven years of the hard-cap era. The commissioner yesterday called those projections unrealistic, citing the strength of the Canadian dollar, the league’s deal with NBC and the move of a franchise from Atlanta to Winnipeg as unique factors in the NHL’s success.

In other words, the commissioner — who locked the league into a 10-year exclusive deal with Snider’s NBC/Comcast for its U.S. rights that is self-limiting — neither believes the league is capable of maintaining meaningful growth nor is willing to invest in that prospect.

But then, Bettman is the one who insists on maintaining a feeble franchise in Phoenix. His is the league that has failed to create an international market. His is the league that allows the Maple Leafs to own a monopoly in Toronto.

In other words, his is the league without a vision beyond reaching into the pockets of the players on the other side of the table.

And his is the league whose hardline owners conveniently stuff gags in their mouths so they don’t have to explain their avarice.

A few years ago, Snider, an Ayn Rand acolyte, gave an interview for a DVD tribute entitled, “The Birth of Objectivism.” In it, he referred to a lecture Ayn Rand Institute founder Leonard Peikoff gave at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1970’s at Snider’s urging and invitation.

It was, Snider fondly recalled, “a lecture on the virtue of selfishness.”